


Later Into the Night

by sidonay



Category: Preacher (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Brief mention of animal death, Gen, Kidnapping, Major Character Injury, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-10 16:28:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8924149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidonay/pseuds/sidonay
Summary: “Look,” Jesse says, “I’m not sure what your endgame is here. If you want me dead, I'm not entirely clear on why you won’t just do it. If this is a ransom thing… Well, I hate to break it to you but I don’t have nearly as much money as someone may have told you and I definitely don’t know anybody who's swimming in as much cash as you figure I'm worth." He pauses, thinks for a moment. "Is it a revenge thing? Is that it? You wanna have some fun? I guarantee you that I’m not worth the trouble.”





	1. Jesse

**Author's Note:**

> Secret Santa gift for [@sarcasmcloud](http://sarcasmcloud.tumblr.com/).
> 
> This is an AU because AUs are the only things I can write anymore. I somehow managed to make this particular idea work without going completely overboard this time. (It’s definitely a lot less weird than any of the AUs that I’ve written in the past, which is quite an accomplishment on my part.)
> 
> I had a good time working on this and I actually really like how it turned out, so that’s pretty nice. Hopefully both the recipient and anyone else who decides to check this out enjoys it, too.

The worst part, Jesse figures—if he could remove himself from the actual, physical pain of the situation—was not being able to remember how this had happened.

Maybe ‘how’ wasn’t the right word (the right question) to choose. It was more likely that ‘why’ was the most prominently missing puzzle piece in this scenario, the middle section that sent a clear picture of the table underneath but didn’t match the image on the surface.

As far as he knew, he hadn’t managed to piss anyone off enough that they would risk grabbing him, manhandling him into the back of a van (a _van_ which, really, was something he had to allow himself to laugh at because, honestly, how truly cliche) and leaving him tied to a chair in the middle of a room that was bigger than the entire floor-plan of his Daddy’s church back home in Texas. (There’s a light, a single bulb the shade of burnt orange that hangs from frayed wires above his head, sways in no specific pattern as if God Himself was tapping at it with a giant finger just to fuck with him a little bit more than He usually did.)

Whoever planned this, whoever wanted him that bad, must have been stewing in it for days, for weeks. Talk about it with friends over bitter alcohol, have it start as a joke: _I hate him, I hate that guy._ They laugh. _What if we grabbed him, showed him how much we really hate him!_ There’s laughter but it’s dying down. _What if… No, but what if we did? What if we really did?_ Plans then: _I know some guys who are down for anything._ _I know someone who knows someone else that has a place._ _I have a cousin that could lend us a van._

_We’re all free Thursday night._

_Holy shit, fellas, we’re really gonna do this._

Jesse’s had a lot of time to think about that, about a conversation that might not have happened anywhere close to how he was imagining it but that’s what happens when you’re smacked around for a little while and then left alone for a little while longer. He decided that he could either spend that silence that made his ears ring (or maybe that was the punches to the side of the head) screaming for help that most likely wasn’t going to come, or he could sort things out and come up with a few stories to pass the time.

He never was much of screamer, in the end. He wasn’t a great storyteller either—the parishioners at his old church (the family church, the falling apart building with paint-peeling walls and creaky floors and broken air conditioning, the one he inherited in a sort of ‘you’re getting this whether you like it or not’ kind of way, which was how a lot of things in his life seemed to wind up) would tell anybody as much—but it was less humiliating than crying and begging and roaring his throat raw. No one but himself would ever get to hear them anyway.

(He’d keep the stories to himself or he’d be dead. Either/or. He was keeping the fingers on the hands tied behind his back crossed for the former but, knowing his luck, it’d be the latter instead.

If this situation was a dog race and his luck determined the winner, the greyhound with ‘absolutely dead’ strapped to its sides would be miles ahead, taking the lead and ten seconds from the finish line.)

So there was the question of ‘why’ wriggling around in his head like a worm after a heavy rain but then, of course, there was also the ‘who’ that curled neatly into that, too. They wore masks because, of course, no self-respecting kidnapper would go through with the dirty deed without a little protection. _If you’re doing something bad_ , his old partner, Tulip, had said to him three years ago when they were sitting in their car, doing nothing in particular even though they were supposed to be working, _no matter what it is, you always wear protection_. She was always dropping little pearls of wisdom like that in his lap and not caring exactly what he did with them.

(He sorts through a few of them like flipping through the pages of a well-worn book but none of those words are useful to him right now. Maybe she never said them to be useful. It was just how she talked and Jesse was the idiot who read into offhand comments too deeply.

Thinking about her now wasn’t too useful, either. There was nothing she could do. She was in another state, working with someone else. As far as she knew, he was working or sleeping or doing whatever it was he thought was appropriate to do when she wasn’t around.

She sent him a postcard once, two months ago. _Missing you lots! Wish you were here._ She had scribbled that on the back. He couldn’t tell if she meant that sarcastically or not. That’s not an easy tone to portray in writing.)

He’d tried to search for any other identifiable marks on his hosts—tattoos or moles or scars—but they were either extremely careful about being covered up in all the right places or these four men were as smooth as newborn babies. If that was the case, Jesse thought he might be able to narrow down the suspect list a little.

He left very few people from his past completely unmarked.

 

— — —

 

He’d been grabbed some time after two in the morning and he’d tried his best to keep track of time since then, just so he knew for certain how long he was gone for so he could curse out everyone in his life that didn’t bother to look for him ( _Three days! I was gone for three days and nobody noticed! Great friends you all turned out to be!_ ) but unless you had a watch (he did not) or were some sort of savant (he was not delusional enough to believe that he was) it was difficult to know that type of thing just off the top of your head, especially when that head is being slammed repeatedly with hands that might have been made of concrete and the nearest clock is one that you can only see as a faint outline in the distance, fixed to a wall and enclosed in a steel grate.

It felt like only a couple hours had passed. There was no sunlight, no creeping edges of a sunrise peeking in through the high and dirty windows surrounding him. That’s what it _felt_ like but he was also painfully aware of at least a few moments of missing time, blanks in his memory, and he didn’t know if they were mere seconds or whole chunks of worrisome minutes that were gone. They’d hit him hard but he hadn’t thought it had been _that_ hard.

He goes over it again: grabbed, moved, tied up, smacked around, left alone.

Other than the other obvious questions he couldn’t pull up an answer for no matter how much he picked at them—like he’d signed up for a website months ago, forgot his password and had to answer security questions that he couldn’t for the life of him recall how the past version of himself would have answered. He probably knew them once upon a time but he’d be fucked if he could bring any of them up now (‘ _Name a significant date from your life’._ It sure as heck wasn’t his birthday, wasn’t Tulip’s, wasn’t the day his father died. What other date could have possibly mattered to him five months ago?)—it was the fact that they’d left him alone that troubled him the most right at that moment.

Were they trying to scare him?

“It’s not gonna work!” He yells to the room, his mouth dry, as if they were listening to him somehow. The words are loud, echoed, and yet Jesse’s not sure he believed a minute of it. He’d been through so much worse in his life than this, he tries to convince himself. He had been kneeling across from his father when the men who broke into the family church dragged them both outside into the cold night and shot his father clean in the head.

Every other terrible thing that had happened to him since then was measured against that one instant and, usually, when a bad moment was over, he’d nod and say to himself: _That could have been so much worse_. Tulip told him about protection and he told her about how things could always damn well be a heck of a lot worse. You could have watched your father get killed.

_You take the worst thing that’s ever happened to you and, well, everything else doesn’t seem quite as bad in comparison._

_You saying I’m not allowed to ever feel bad about anything because it might not be the worst thing that’s ever happened to me?_ Tulip had asked when Jesse explained it to her. She’d snorted at him, shook her head. _That’s stupid, Jesse Custer. I’m pretty sure you’re allowed to be angry whenever the hell you want. I’m going to curse God whether somebody steals my car or I just happen to stub my toe one afternoon. Sometimes life is just shit._

Remembering that discussion here and now, Jesse was starting to accept that this situation might also count as something that could possibly be well and truly bad enough to actually matter when it was over.

Even then, though, it was still a hard maybe. He could still put a lid on the slow boil of his troubled feeling and nervousness so he didn’t have to look at it. People liked to pretend that changing your way of thinking, changing habits was as easy as snapping your fingers (which, Jesse would point out, is not that simple, nor was making a pie if he wanted to be completely honest) but it most certainly wasn’t. You spend your life telling yourself that the worst possible thing that could happen to you has already come to pass, you figure everything bad after that is like a thick splinter just under the skin: it hurts, but it’s a situation that’s efficiently remedied and handily forgotten. It barely even draws any blood.

A splinter is the easiest hurt to take care of; it’s when you’re gutted like a fish that you really have a serious problem.

Jesse’s been gutted twice before and, the longer he sat here, the more he could feel the knife start to push it’s dull blade into the side of his stomach.

 

— — —

 

More time ticks by. Maybe they weren’t trying to scare him. Maybe they just weren’t coming back. This place they took him was abandoned, vacated a long time ago, long enough that he couldn’t even tell what it used to be when it was full and functional and it was likely enough that there wasn’t anybody who would know to look for him here.

That was a depressing thought: he’d been left here to starve, to die of thirst and, unlike his friend Cassidy, there’s no way he could bounce back from death. Cassidy, who had died at least six times since Jesse had known him but always somehow managed to come back to life the next day or a week later smelling of tobacco and whiskey and wondering why Jesse always looked at him like that.

( _Like what?_ Jesse had asked once when Cassidy brought it up.

 _Like you thought you weren’t gonna see me again_ , he said, as if death was merely a knee-high obstacle he had to step over once in awhile and he wasn’t sure why Jesse was always making such a big deal out it. ( _I didn’t even think you liked me_ , he said once.

 _Of course I like you_ , Jesse had replied. _Don’t be stupid._ Cassidy may have started as a suspect and then an informant but they were friends now and that was just how things were these days. Jesse didn’t make friends very easily so, when he actually did, it mattered.)

Jesse had asked him how he did it, how he kept coming back. Whatever it was, he didn’t plan on doing anything with the information. He just needed to know. _Trade secret_ , Cassidy had winked. _The sun and I don’t get along and death and me, well, we’re surprisingly well acquainted. That’s all you need to know._

Jesse was only just beginning to think that Cassidy wasn’t dying at all, he was just exceptionally good at faking it when he needed to which, as it turned out, was pretty damn often. Cassidy didn’t like to pay for things with his own money if he didn’t have to and he was highly proficient in riling the wrong people up. You get the wrong sorts of people angry, your best options are either to run or die. Cassidy chose to die. Jesse had done the running thing before and it worked, for the most part. He’d never tried dying, though. Not on purpose, anyway.

(He knew someone who was apparently a master at making it look like you had been killed. He’d even write out and get a local paper to publish an obituary if you wanted. Jesse had considered it once and only once but it turned out he was too expensive. Cassidy’s way seemed cheaper but he also negated the expected outcome of his apparent death by refusing to leave the city that he died in.

Jesse didn’t understand Cassidy but he liked having him around which he figured was enough.)

Jesse had been on his way to meet him when he was taken. Cassidy had called him late at night from a malfunctioning pay phone while Jesse sat, wide awake, staring at a cup of coffee and he could barely understand a word Cassidy was saying ( _I don’t trust those cell phones, Padre_ , Cassidy had said. _I heard they give you cancer._ Jesse wasn’t sure if Cassidy was pulling his leg or not so he didn’t remark on it but he did remind him that he was getting tired of telling him to stop with that ridiculous nickname. _I haven’t been a preacher in almost two years, Cassidy!_ ). He’d called Jesse and told him he had something important to tell him.

 _Just tell me now_ , Jesse had said and Cassidy’s voice was low, almost whispered when he replied.

_It’s not somethin’ you really tell a feller over the phone, alright?_

Jesse had agreed to go find Cassidy at the bar he liked to hang out in and left the diner that he frequented often enough that the waitstaff and the owner saw fit to call him a ‘regular’ (and allowed him to smoke inside of even though it was against the law) and it was five minutes after that that he was stuffed head-first into a black van.

For a split second, Jesse thought there was a ray of hope for him yet: he was going to meet Cassidy and he didn’t show. Why didn’t he think of that until now? Isn’t that how these things always went? _We were supposed to meet for lunch_. _He was coming home from school. She was supposed to pick me up._

_But they never showed._

Cassidy was a lazy hedonist, sure, but even the most messed up people had their moments of clarity. Cassidy would realize that this time was different than all the other times that Jesse had ditched him in the past (it was another one of his bad habits but it was one he hoped he was on his way to fixing). He’d realize and he’d go looking for him. (He wouldn’t call the authorities, though, said he didn’t trust them. _Did you forget_ , Jesse had asked once, _that I am also one of them?_

 _No_ , Cassidy replied. _But you’re different. This is just a costume._

At the time, Jesse had considered those to be surprisingly wise words and thought that, maybe, this man had some hidden depths after all until a little while later he figured out that the entire time they had been having that brief conversation, Cassidy had been on a shitload of ecstasy. He supposed that didn’t really change the meaning of the words, but it certainly altered where Jesse thought they had come from.)

Dying, pissing people off, and, sometimes, finding things. That was what Cassidy was good at. That was all Jesse had to rely on.

His nose starts to bleed.

He’s not sure if it’s because of his head injury or the stress of that sudden revelation.

 

— — —

 

Jesse’s considering that it might be worthwhile to just take a nap when the large and old metal doors slide achingly slowly open and the men who he had thought abandoned him come wandering back in.

“That was a long bathroom break you guys went on,” Jesse says because taunting the predators instead of rolling over to show his belly really did seem like the best plan at the time. “You all meet at an IBS support group or something?” _Get it?_ He wants to ask. _Because you were all gone for so long and also because you’re full of shit_.

“Shut up,” the third guy to enter yells at him.

“We had to run out, get a friend,” another one says with a softer voice (an older voice) and he sounds amused, tickled pink by his vague comment.

“What’s the matter?” Jesse asks. “The four of you can’t handle me on your own?”

“Shut up,” the same guy to remark to Jesse’s earlier comment says, as if those are the only two words he knows (they probably are). The other one isn’t speaking and the fourth hasn’t walked in yet, like he’s waiting behind the curtain to make some grand entrance. Was it a last minute choice or did they spend the time going back and forth from wherever they were planning out the theatrics? Jesse could ask but instead he says:

“The way you guys hit… you really think another pair of fists is going to make a difference? Like being smacked in the face by flies.” The man who was telling him to keep his mouth shut walks over and Jesse expects some pain for that comment but he just leans down slightly, puts hands on either arm of the chair. His eyes are dark.

“Come on, man,” the guy says. “Just shut up.” He says it to him like: _Hey, just stop. I don’t want you to get hurt anymore. I’m doing you a favor here. Do me one back._

“How much is he paying you?” Jesse asks him quietly. It’s an off-the-wall remark, a wild guess but Jesse had met guys like this, ones who were only doing this to pay the rent or buy their girlfriend a nice ring. They didn’t enjoy the violence, didn’t want someone else’s blood under their fingernails. They didn’t want the excess guilt weighing them down. They just wanted to get this over with and go home.

“Excuse me?” He sounds offended by the question but he hasn’t moved either.

“You know,” Jesse says, “I used to be a preacher for awhile. Some say I still am. Just because I left… Well, we don’t have time for the whole spiel. But I used to be preacher. Anything you tell me, well, I’ll treat it like a confession. Strictest confidence.” He can’t see the entirety of the expression but, to Jesse, his eyes look annoyed and then surprised and maybe a bit curious but anything else that would come of it is lost when the sound of a dog snarling and barking vibrates throughout the room. The man hovering over him checks over his shoulder. This fragile bubble of a moment has been popped. Jesse sighs. “You better smack me or something or your boss is going to think you’re being nice to me.”

Jesse isn’t sure if the backhand that makes his ears ring was for show or if he really didn’t get through to him and he was fed up with telling him to stop talking. He spits blood on the dirty floor and then rights himself, smiles at his assaulter with stained teeth but then the guy is shifting his large frame to the side and Jesse finds himself with only a few feet separating his immobile body from an irritable Rottweiler being held with a white-knuckle grip by a very nervous masked man.

He had truly been hoping—when he first heard the barking—that they were just blasting stock noises from a pair of pricy speakers to shake him up a bit because even the most compassionate of dog lovers out there would eventually admit if you picked at them enough that an angry dog (a real, provoked, cold-hearted rage squirrelled up behind dripping teeth) is just plain fucking terrifying.

“Our friend,” the older voice says, gestures towards all one-hundred-and-thirty-somewhat pounds of muscle on four legs. “Jesse, we’d like you to meet Chuck.” He turns to the dog. “Chuck, meet dinner.”

“Hold on,” Jesse says, clears his throat and tongues at a tooth that he’s trying to figure out if it’s loose or if he was just imagining it, “Now you’ve just confused him. Am I ‘Jesse’ or ‘dinner’?”

“You’re pretty cavalier,” the man replies, “For a guy who’s about to get his face get chewed off.” Jesse, despite the pea-sized lump forming low in his throat, would shrug if he could move his shoulders. Instead, he says:

“That’s a big word, ‘cavalier’. Where’d you learn that? Because I find it difficult to believe that any of you managed to graduate high school.” Apparently that was the wrong thing to say because the man whistles through his teeth, makes a motion with two fingers and the man holding the dog loosens his grip on the chain keeping Chuck steady. Jesse actually opens his mouth to make a noise but nothing comes out; all he can do is watch this demon dressed in fur start to close the gap between them and he shuts his eyes, silently prays that the damn thing kills him quick because he refuses to live his life without a nose but then there’s another whistle and everyone starts laughing.

One eye slowly pulls open and then the other. The three guys are standing just off to the side, out of the way, the fourth with his grip once again tightened on the chain but the Rottweiler is close enough now that Jesse thinks he can smell its hot, sour breath. He hadn’t realized he was holding his own until his chest starts to ache and he finally lets it go, a big rush of air spilling from his lungs and he thinks he hears the man who tried to make him shut up say something but it’s too quiet for Jesse to tell if it was directed at him or just anybody who happened to hear him (or, maybe, it wasn’t meant for anyone at all).

They seem like they’re giving him a moment to collect himself or maybe just continuing to enjoy the fact that they managed to really put a crack in Jesse’s armor.

“Look,” Jesse says, “I’m not sure what your endgame is here. If you want me dead, I'm not entirely clear on why you won’t just do it. If this is a ransom thing… Well, I hate to break it to you but I don’t have nearly as much money as someone may have told you and I definitely don’t know anybody who's swimming in as much cash as you figure I'm worth." He pauses because the room had decided that for a brief moment, it was going to start to spin. "Is it a revenge thing?" He asks once he gets the world to stop moving so sickeningly fast. "Is that it? You wanna have some fun? I guarantee you that I’m not worth the trouble.”

“We know you have money,” the older voice says, walks over to him, crosses his arms, and Jesse knows he’s supposed to look menacing but, after being confronted with a Rottweiler only controlled by a strong grip and a whistle, a heavy-set guy with an old-school ski mask pulled over his face is suddenly almost comical. (Almost. He just needs to keep telling himself that, even though his slowly ripping gut is whispering that it’s entirely possible that he underestimated these men.) “You’re just as corrupt as the rest of ‘em. Everybody knows it. You pretend—” He stops himself before he gathers too much steam. This is a rant he’s gone off on before. “But this isn’t about that.”

“Revenge then.” Jesse had seen revenge killings before too many times and they were some of the ugliest ones you could ever be forced to witness the aftermath of. Men (it was pretty much always men) mutilated, beaten, tortured, the corpse displayed. People didn’t normally bury revenge killings in the bottom of a river or under twenty tons of concrete—they wanted the world to know: this bastard hurt me, hurt my family and you do that… well, this is what you get.

(Tulip had been a big proponent of revenge. _Feels good_ , she said. _Cleanses the soul._

 _That doesn’t sound right_ , Jesse had said back. She’d just rolled her eyes at him. That was the last civil conversation they had had in person.

Jesse had explained the situation to Cassidy once and asked him what he thought.

 _I’ve tried revenge_ , Cassidy had said. _It gets boring after the first ten times._ )

But wait: no. That didn’t make sense. If it was retribution—

“Why are you wearing masks?” You kill someone because of a past wrong, you want them to see that it was you, even if they’re the only ones who will ever know. The only reason they’d keep themselves covered is if they planned on eventually letting him go and, well, wouldn’t that just be the nicest surprise of the night.

“The idea of you never knowing who did this to you or why is a lot more enjoyable than rubbing who we are in your face,” the older man explains. “Besides, you don’t need to know. We’re not doing this for you.”

 _Nevermind then_ , Jesse thinks, _this is definitely revenge_. Just not for something _he_ had done.

Jesse had been around to witness the end result of those kinds of killings, too. The ones where someone messed up, did something wrong and then came home to find their cat, their wife, their kid nailed to the front door.

“Ah,” Jesse says. “That’s certainly something to think about.” And then someone backhands him again.

 

— — —

 

They’ve been hitting him for a better part of what might have been an hour. Just that and not much else.

It was heavy fists colliding with any part of him that happened to be open and waiting. After awhile, it stops hurting and just sounds like someone punching a butchered cow hanging from the ceiling in a freezer. Thud, whack, thud.

Unlike that cow, though, Jesse can still bleed.

He hears someone say _stop_ and, surprisingly, it does. The shadows over him change and then there’s a mask floating in his line of sight.

“How you doing? Good? Still with us?”

“Mhm,” Jesse murmurs. “I’m doing just great.”

“Really?” The voice questions, sounds amused and a hand swipes at his face, comes back with fingers slick with blood and saliva. “Because you seem to be leaking.”

“Well, that’s embarrassing,” Jesse manages to say and he’s not sure why his words sound so garbled and mushy. He knows that isn’t right but he doesn’t know what those fists could have unsettled so badly internally to screw with things that much. _Know any good dry cleaners? On second thought, maybe I need a mechanic instead._ It’s there, settled in the back of his throat but he can’t push it out so he forces another smile instead. They both know that he doesn’t mean it and the man’s eyes almost look like he’s pitying him, as if Jesse was a simpleton who didn’t realize that this wasn’t pretend, that this wasn’t a game, and that the finale wasn’t a lift to the hospital and a mug of hot chocolate.

The thing is, Jesse _does_ know that. He’s all too painfully aware, but he also knows there’s no point in crying about it either. His time was going to come eventually, just like everyone else (except maybe Cassidy but even _he_ had to leave the world behind someday). His father hadn’t cried when those men shot him. His eyes were wet, but he hadn’t cried. He’d just stared at Jesse and told him: _We Custers don’t cry. We fight._

It’s not easy to fight with hands tied behind his back, so he did the best with what he had. It didn’t seem to do him much good in the end but that wasn’t his fault. Some guys just don’t know how to take a joke.

He doesn’t see the next hit coming so he can’t steel himself for it and knuckles collide with the side of his head hard enough that the room goes white and then black and then he’s suddenly not sitting upright anymore—the chair is on its side and he’s fallen with it. He wheezes in dust and his own blood. The dog is growling, snarling and the man holding him says:

“Are we finished? Because I’d really like to give this thing back to Henry now.”

“Yeah,” the older man says and they all sound like they’re speaking to Jesse through six layers of thick cotton. He can pick up the noises but he’s not sure what to do with them, as if he’s holding pieces of a broken vase but he doesn’t have any glue. “Yeah, we’re finished.” The kidnapper is speaking to someone else now: “Make it quick. Put him out of his misery.”

 _I’m not that miserable_ , Jesse thinks. _I’ve felt a lot worse_. _I’ve been through a lot worse._ He’s measuring this moment against the one from his childhood. But then he hears Tulip laughing.

_That’s stupid, Jesse Custer. Sometimes life is just shit._

The man with the dark eyes, the one who had tried to get him to stop talking, who didn’t seem to even want to be there, is standing over him with a gun. He hears the telltale click of a single shot being readied.

“Sorry, man. He just wanted to make a point,” he says and Jesse has no interest in witnessing his own death so he closes his swelling, bruised eyes, just like he had with the Rottweiler, and waits for it. Jesse wants to spit at him, to ask if he’s proud of himself right here in this moment and if he’s not, Jesse hopes he takes all of this to his grave and that the shame he feels is so toxic that it rots the ground he’s buried under but his brain just isn’t working at the right speed anymore so all he manages to gurgle out is “Fuck—” before there’s a thunderous _bang_.

It seems, merely seconds after, as if the entire universe has fallen silent from shock.

 _Is this what being dead is?_ Jesse wonders. _Nothing at all?_ Then, a realization: _Wait. I’m not—_ _I’m not dead._

_I’m not dead._

“Fuck!” Someone shouts. “How the hell did you find—”

_I’m alive._

The man doesn’t get a chance to finish his sentence because that’s right about when the rest of the bullets start flying.

The gunfire is decidedly brief and then everything is quiet again, save for what sounded like two people other than Jesse himself breathing. There are footsteps and then an all-too-familiar voice.

“Jesus Christ, Padre. You look like shit.” More movement and, by the time Jesse manages to pry his eyes open, Cassidy is kneeling in front of him, hunched over slightly, wholly unnecessary sunglasses pushed down to the tip of his nose, blood splattered in tiny flecks across his face. There’s something large and black tucked loosely into his jeans, just barely hidden under his coat. ( _Gun_ , says a voice in the back of Jesse’s head.) “Sorry we’re late. Traffic was a son-of-a-bitch.”

“‘We’?” Jesse questions and Cassidy lifts himself up just enough so he could step easily over Jesse and the chair, starts pulling at the ropes that had bound him, uses just his fingers and Jesse hears him grumble something about leaving his knife at home (... _like an idiot. The one time when I actually need the fucker and I don’t have it_ ). His disappearing figure leaves a clear view of the rest of the room and Jesse finds himself staring at four masked bodies with gaping holes in places they’d never recover from, the dog on it’s side and missing most of its head. The only other person still standing is holding a shotgun and frowning, not at Jesse, but at the dead animal just a couple feet away. “Donnie?!” Jesse exclaims, speaks like his cheeks are stuffed with balls of paper and he lets a trickle of blood and spit drain out the side of his mouth before he continues. “You brought _Donnie_?” Cassidy had brought Donnie, which meant that Cassidy had gone to Quincannon which then, in turn, opened up a lot of questions Jesse didn’t quite feel up to asking.

“Told ‘em I could handle this nonsense myself, just figured he might know where you were but he, uh, insisted on giving me the backup once he found ya. Said we’ll owe him one. Came in handy after all, though, so I won’t complain. Not much anyway.” Jesse’s hands and ankles rubbed raw but finally free, he pulls his arms forward—his shoulders and knees screaming—and he rolls himself off the chair onto his stomach, gives his fingers a chance to wake up before he tries to shift into a position that didn’t make him feel like he might be suffocating. Cassidy won’t say Quincannon’s name outright even though Jesse’s sure everyone still alive in this room knows exactly who he’s talking about. (Owing that particular man a favor wasn’t the most welcome news—especially now—and Jesse realizes he’s almost wishing that the masked men had just finished the job because whatever a person like Quincannon would want from someone like Jesse wouldn’t be anywhere near as generous as this.)  “Killed two of these fellers. And the dog.”

“Didn’t enjoy that by the way,” Donnie says as Cassidy grabs Jesse by the shoulders and pushes him onto his side before helping him sit up. “Killing the dog, I mean.” He sighs, lifts a shoulder, finally acknowledges Jesse. “Quincannon told me to tell you that this wasn’t his fault. He didn’t have anything to do with this. They,”—Donnie uses his shotgun to gesture at the bodies—“Haven’t worked for him for ten months now.” He absentmindedly fiddles with the hearing-aid on his right ear and grimaces. “Up to me, I might have let them finish the job.”

“Yeah. Good thing t’wasn’t up to you then, yeah?” Cassidy says to him and then turns back to Jesse, puts a hand on the side of his neck, a roughly placed but comforting gesture. Jesse didn’t blame Donnie, really. Jesse had broken Donnie’s arm in a bar fight that Donnie had started and had also somewhat indirectly been the reason behind why the guy had stuck his head in the trunk of a car and shot off his pistol in a bungled suicide attempt that left him partially deaf (it was a long story and one of the very few that Jesse wasn’t proud to tell). Donnie hadn’t forgiven him but he’d stopped trying to explicitly murder him, too, and Jesse always wondered if he just wasn’t good at holding onto hate for very long (doubtful—they had grown up together and Jesse knew Donnie a lot better than he’d like) or if Quincannon was holding him back, the same way that one of those kidnappers had held back their Rottweiler.

Cassidy is asking Jesse if he can stand and Jesse nods once, plants his hands flat on the floor and hoists himself up, gets on his feet on his own but that’s about as far as he can manage.

“Alright then,” Cassidy says and a thin arm is being draped over Jesse’s back, fingernails secure in his upper arm and they start to walk. “We’ll get you cleaned up and get a drink or two or twenty in you.” Jesse trips over something—his own feet or the dead ones from someone else—but Cassidy catches him. “Whoa now. I gotcha.”

They catch up to where Donnie is standing just in front of the doorway and they stop. Jesse watches as Donnie lifts a hand to somewhere between his shoulder and his face as if he’s actually planning on helping or maybe just touching Jesse for some reason but, he seems to change his mind, moves it towards a pocket instead and takes out a noisy mess of keys. He hoists his shotgun over a shoulder and points out into the dim grey of an early morning just beyond the heavy metal doors. He doesn’t say where he’s going and simply leaves, feet crunching on gravel.

Outside is cool and the air smells like garbage and salt and Jesse props himself up against the building, feels chilly metal and coarse rust against the tips of his fingers. Cassidy rests beside him in as much shadow as the slight overhang from the expansive roof would allow and crosses arms over his chest, stares off into the distance.

Jesse looks up.

“It’s gonna rain,” Jesse says, takes in a slow breath through his nose and then coughs. He’s pretty sure that wasn’t what he wanted to say (if he even really wanted to say anything at all), but it’s what happened to come out and he sways slightly, digs his heels into the soft ground of crushed rock and loose dirt. He scrapes his thumbnail against the wall behind him.

“Probably,” Cassidy says as if he didn’t know how else he was supposed to respond to that comment and saying nothing at all hadn’t even crossed his mind (it rarely did). He turns abruptly to face Jesse, picks up a loose corner of his own ratty shirt, uses it to wipe at the blood on Jesse’s face and Jesse allows it, doesn’t look at him, keeps his eyes directed towards the sky, waits for him to finish. Cassidy is still watching him—he can feel it—so Jesse moves his head down and over, narrows his right eye and that one only because the left one just won’t move anymore. “I’m truly sorry about this whole fuckin’ mess.”

“Sorry? Why?” Jesse questions but Cassidy doesn’t answer, seems to be trying to pretend that he hadn’t even heard him so he tries something else: “What was it you were going to tell me?” Jesse’s not sure how he’s getting these words out, his head heavy and fuzzy, vision soft around the edges, and he knows there’s an internal clock somewhere low in his belly that’s just counting down the seconds until he collapses.

“You know,” Cassidy says after a far too lengthy moment of consideration, “I don’t rightly remember.”

“Hm. Sure,” Jesse says, not believing him for a minute but in no condition to push it. Cassidy looks away and seems to notice something on the ground, bends down at the waist to pick it up at the same time as a large, black SUV pulls up beside them, Donnie behind the wheel. When Cassidy straightens, he’s got a tooth held between his thumb and index finger.

“This belong to you?” Jesse runs a thick tongue over his gums but can’t find any holes and he shakes his head the best that he can, watches Cassidy lift his shoes, check the bottoms. The left one is coated with blood, two other teeth stuck in the grooves. “Huh. Must have brought ‘em from inside.” He pockets the one in his hand, scrapes the others off on the ground and then sweeps an arm towards the vehicle, the engine still running. “Your chariot awaits.”

Jesse must have blacked out again because one second he’s standing outside and the next he’s sitting in the back seat of the car, a seatbelt secured across his aching chest. Donnie’s driving, taking them down some road Jesse doesn’t recognize. From where he’s sitting in the passenger seat, Cassidy twists his arm to reach back and pat Jesse on the knee.

The radio is turned on after that, channels bouncing from news to classical to static before landing on a station crackling out a classic rock tune that Jesse felt as if he knew somewhere in the back of his head but couldn’t actually identify.

Cassidy starts humming and Donnie opens his window to let the rushing, ocean-like sound of other cars in to compete with the other noises swirling around them inside the vehicle. Cassidy says something but Jesse realizes it wasn’t meant for him.

He rests his head against the seatbelt, closes his eyes and listens as it starts to rain.


	2. Cassidy

Cassidy has been sitting at the usual place for over an hour before he finally realizes that Jesse isn’t coming. This wouldn’t be the first time—nor the last, he assumed—that Jesse had said that the two of them were definitely going to meet up, absolutely he’ll be there, only for him not to show and offer some flimsy (but believable, always somehow believable and Cassidy couldn’t decide if Jesse was really just that convincing or if Cassidy had a Jesse-shaped blind spot whenever it came to the guy) excuse as to why he hadn’t been there.

Normally, Cassidy would chalk this moment up to just one of those numerous instances, finish his third beer and go home. He’d wait for Jesse to call or to be there on his doorstep with an apology on his mouth and a shrug with a single hand. _I got caught up. I got called in. I wasn’t feeling great. I’m not drinking tonight._ This time, though... This time had a different feel to it. Cassidy had made sure to use his Serious Voice when talking to Jesse on the phone—a disturbingly wet warmth and sticky residue pressing into his ear and along the side of his jaw (he put up with it because he’d heard once from one of his dealers that cell phones cause cancer and he didn’t know for sure if it was true but he was already putting enough of a mess into his body. The last thing he need to add were tumors)—and told him that they needed to talk. He had something important to tell him.

 _It can’t wait. It has to be tonight._ (It was two in the morning but he knew that Jesse would still be awake, knew his schedule almost better than his own sometimes.)

 _Just tell me now_ , Jesse had said, his voice surprisingly clear on the other end of the line and Cassidy had moved the receiver away from his mouth to exhale, leaned an arm against the scratched box that housed the phone, rested his forehead on his limb.

_It’s not somethin’ you really tell a feller over the phone, alright?_

(He was going to tell him the truth about who (about _what_ ) he was. He’d teased and hinted at it since the first day he and Jesse had met on opposite sides of a metal table in a small room but Jesse had either never caught on or he did but he refused to believe it. Cassidy had known both types of people and the latter, in his experience, were always the worst of the two.)

Jesse had chuckled at that and it wasn’t until later that Cassidy realized it was a nervous sort of laugh. He didn’t blame him; Cassidy was rarely serious about anything and was good at faking it just to get to the punchline if he had to (or, in some cases, to save his own skin), but the downside was that when he really, honestly meant it, people tended to not take the words as particularly credible. It had taken Jesse awhile to figure it out (it usually did with him), but now he was capable of hearing the nuance (as much ‘nuance’ as someone like Cassidy could really have; he wasn’t stupid enough to think that just because he had lived many lives and died a few times he was any wiser than anybody else). He knew. He understood.

Which was why, when Jesse still hadn’t shown up, Cassidy knew something was very, very wrong.

 

— — —

 

The first place he went was the diner that Jesse had accidentally become a regular over the past few months. The two of them met there occasionally even though Cassidy hated the food and Jesse most definitely hated the coffee but it was half-way between Jesse’s job and his apartment so, in the end, convenience won out. It was about a twenty minute walk from the bar that Cassidy favored and also lived above (this was where he had been earlier, where Jesse had agreed to find him) and he spent the short trip with his hands in his pockets, cold air prickling his face, wondering about both the best and worst case scenarios and if worrying himself with either was really all that productive.

“He’s not here,” one of the waitresses says as soon as Cassidy walks in. She smiles grimly at him but it fades quickly into a sigh, doesn’t look particularly happy to be there. _That makes two of us_ , Cassidy thinks. “He left over an hour ago. Went outside to have a smoke, talked to someone, walked off.” She seems like she’s in a hurry to get rid of him and he doesn’t know why. Sure, he may have complained a few times, sent some plates back and he occasionally had the habit of resting his legs in places they didn’t exactly belong but he was also nothing but a gentleman to the staff and he tipped well. She was probably just pissed that it was after midnight and she had to spend her time serving drunk people grilled cheese.

Cassidy doesn’t have to ask which way Jesse had gone because that much was obvious. What wasn’t obvious was what had happened between him leaving and him not showing up and he meanders back down the sidewalk he had just walked with a new purpose, keeps scanning the sides of the roads and the alleys in case someone who slept there might have been watching when it all went down (that’s what he tells himself, ignores the voice saying that what he’s really doing is looking for a body).

He nearly moves right past it and if it was wasn’t for the way the case glinted in the street light directly above it he might have never even known but there, in the gutter, is a phone—more specifically, _Jesse’s_ phone. The screen is cracked but it’s still working and he scrolls through without reading the messages too closely. An anonymous, unmarked number was the last one to call but Cassidy figures that must have been him. No suspicious texts, no voicemails.

“They took him,” says a voice directly behind him and Cassidy starts, turns, sees an older woman in ragged clothes leaning against the wall of a jewelry store with the metal gate pulled tightly down over the storefront and it rattles when she shifts positions. She scratches at a spot just behind her ear.

“Who took him?”

“The man with that phone? A van pulled up. Black, I think…” She trails off a moment, taps her tongue against her brown front teeth. “They just took him. Hauled him in.”

“Did you— I mean, did you see anything else? License or…?”

“Son,” she says, even though Cassidy is pretty sure he’s a hell of a lot older than her (he certainly doesn’t look it, though), “I’m practically blind. The only reason I saw any of that was because it happened only a few feet in front of my face.”

“Fair enough,” Cassidy nods, takes out his almost empty pack of cigarettes and he considers passing a couple to her but changes his mind and slaps the crumpled package into her hand. Jesse grabbed right off the street and stuffed into the back of what Cassidy assumed was an unmarked van. There was only one person that Cassidy could think of that might know something about it (that might be involved) but it wasn’t exactly somewhere that he was itching to go. “Fucking goddammit,” he says to himself, and starts to walk back the way he came.

 

— — —

 

“What seems to be the problem, Mister Cassidy?” Quincannon asks after letting Cassidy stew in the silence for a minute. He’s behind his desk but he’s not sitting in the chair, is instead standing by the expansive window that looked out towards the rest of the city and Cassidy found himself wondering idly if the glass was bulletproof or if the guy thought that somebody who’d go through the trouble to take a shot at him from this high up deserved a freebie. The only other person in the room is Quincannon’s right-hand-man, Donnie, who Cassidy was pretty sure he’d met once or twice before through Jesse, but Donnie wasn’t acknowledging him as if he knew who Cassidy was. (Cassidy knew that it couldn’t have been because he wasn’t particularly memorable so it must have been on purpose; if he knew that Cassidy was close pals with the man responsible for the joints in his arm that ached when it rained, that might explain it. Jesse had also confirmed in a sort of roundabout way that the rumors that it also might have been his fault that Donnie wore those hearing-aids weren’t rumors at all but no matter how many drinks Cassidy plied him with, he hadn’t been able to crowbar Jesse open enough to get the entire story.)

Cassidy thinks about remaining standing, too, but he’s never been much of one for following a crowd (unless it was a good enough cause, but he hadn’t found one of those yet), so he sits in one of the low chairs opposite Quincannon’s desk and then lifts his legs to rest them on the flat surface, crossing his ankles. The noise is enough for Quincannon to finally turn around to face him and he frowns, raises an eyebrow.

“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?” He asks, as if he hadn’t known Cassidy by name right away but he definitely knew his face. Cassidy wasn’t sure how that could be true. Maybe Quincannon was just toying with him, as unlikely as that seemed as well. If he didn’t like you, didn’t like what you were offering, he’d just straight up piss on it if he felt like it. (Cassidy had heard he had done just that in the Mayor’s briefcase during a private meeting once. Nobody outside of the building seemed to know why, they just knew that it happened. Donnie had been in the room, but Donnie also didn’t talk much.)

“I don’t owe you money, do I?” Cassidy responds with a question of his own, tries to make it sound like he’s jabbing the guy in the side with an elbow, cheeky and friendly, but hidden underneath that is a sudden frozen burst of fear because Quincannon is not the kind of man you want to owe even a single quarter. They don’t call him The Butcher only because that’s where he got his start.

“No,” Quincannon says and then: “You didn’t answer my question, by the way.”

“I mean,” Cassidy gestures to himself. “Yes and no. If you’ll be wanting my head or I owe you money then yes, I am definitely supposed to be dead.”

“Hm,” Quincannon murmurs, crosses one arm over his chest, balances the elbow from the other in his hand, presses his index finger to his lips, studies Cassidy for a lot longer than he was comfortable with and the dim lighting glints subtly off the frames of his glasses when he shifts on his feet. “That wasn’t the question I wanted an answer for. So I repeat: What can I do for you?”

“Ah, right. That. Just a minor thing, really. You see, my friend seems to have been nabbed off the street and I have a feeling you may have some idea where he might be.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because you know everything. Have ten little fingers and ten toes stuck in multiple pies,” Cassidy says and Quincannon takes a step forward, leans his palms flat on the desk, taps his thumb on the dark stained wood.

“Jesse Custer,” he says after another lengthy silence.

“What’s that?”

“Jesse Custer was the one taken.”

“How could you possibly—” Cassidy starts (how could he know that so quickly if he wasn’t the one responsible, if he wasn’t sitting in here waiting for someone to come crawling in, begging for help) but he’s interrupted.

“Because you don’t have many friends, Mister Cassidy.” A hesitation, maybe for dramatic effect or maybe just because he’s thinking about something. “You’re right. I do know very nearly everything. But I can tell you right now that I do not know who took Jesse Custer, nor where they might have taken him.”

“Oh.” Cassidy deflates a little. He had taken a risk coming here and it wasn’t even going to pay off. He wasn’t lying when he had said that—to the people whom he owed money or whom he royally pissed off—he was supposed to be dead. It was easy to remain that way if you lurked, kept to the shadows, minded your own business and only used dealers that you trusted or were too high on their own supply to care about being a tattletale but walking into the lion’s den like this was as if he had hung a neon arrow over his head for all the world to see. Quincannon may not spread the news (not unless it was in his best interest to) but Cassidy had passed by at least thirty other guys before he made it to the top floor, thirty guys who could hold grudges or had acquaintances sprinkled around the city that Cassidy had very likely gotten into trouble with once upon a time.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if one of them was prepared to whisper to someone who would whisper to someone else: _Remember Cassidy? Supposedly died, choking on his own vomit in some apartment? He ain’t dead. Yeah, I just saw him last night, going to talk to the boss._

Cassidy was very difficult to kill, but it didn’t mean that he enjoyed letting other people try.

He drops his legs from the desk, puts his hands on his knees, his mind already attempting to formulate a plan, tick off the boxes of who else he could call that might be able to help. (Tulip, maybe, but she was over four hours away and there was no guarantee that she’d even come; she might do it for Cassidy if he asked nicely enough but she was still simmering with anger directed at Jesse and the city as a whole for what they did to her. Then again, Cassidy knew that you only stayed mad at the ones you truly cared about (or something to that effect), so there was a slim chance she would make the trip.

He didn’t dare go to Jesse’s co-workers. He didn’t trust a single one of them. Jesse had been amused when Cassidy had revealed that thought to him one evening, asked him if he had forgotten that Jesse was ‘one of them’, too. He hadn’t. He just knew that Jesse was different.)

He’s up on his feet and halfway to the door when he hears Quincannon clear his throat and start to speak.

“But I could help you. Just because I don’t have any answers for you right now doesn’t mean that I can’t find them out.” Cassidy turns slowly, narrows his eyes and considers him. He hasn’t moved from his position, is still leaning over his desk, his thumb still now and Cassidy glances at Donnie but Donnie has nothing to say, just blinks at him and Cassidy thinks he can see the barest hint of a shrug. He regards Quincannon again.

“You’d do that? Out of, what… the kindness of your heart?” Quincannon laughs at that, a solid guffaw and he, too, looks briefly to Donnie, who takes a miniscule step back, an expression pulling across his face that seems to say: _Why do you two keep expecting me to have opinions on anything that’s going on here right now?_

“Of course not. You’d owe me a favor. Besides, Jesse Custer has something I want. This could work out remarkably well for the both of us.”

Cassidy chews on the inside of his cheek, gnaws hard enough that he can taste his own bitter blood. Owing a man like Quincannon a favor is not something anyone should take lightly and accepting on Jesse’s behalf wasn’t particularly ideal but, on the other side of things, the longer Cassidy waited to find him, the less likely he’d be walking into a decent outcome and, really, it wasn’t as if he had a large swath of better options to choose from.

“Okay,” Cassidy says. “Deal.” He thinks maybe he’d want to shake on it but no hand is offered to him.

“Well, alright then,” Quincannon says, straightening his back and clapping his hands together. “We’ve got a deal. Give me an hour and a half.” He sits down in his brown leather chair, holds up two fingers because that time frame was difficult to turn into a gesture and then picks up the surprisingly old-school corded phone that was resting on his desk, uses it to gesticulate as he talks. “An hour and a half and I’ll get you the location of your friend.” Cassidy waits there, figures he could stare at the wall for awhile, study the patterns on the paper, the cracks in the ceiling, but then he notices that Quincannon is staring at him, frowning, receiver resting on the side of his neck. “Get out of my office.”

“Ah. Okay. Gotcha,” Cassidy salutes sloppily with a finger and hightails it out the door, disregarding the lazy elevator and choosing the take the stairs, hopping down them two at a time and it isn’t until he reaches the bottom floor that he realizes he never told Quincannon where to find him when he was done.

 

— — —

 

The only place that’s still open at almost three in the morning is a bar just across the street from Quincannon’s building and it’s a little more upscale than the types of places that Cassidy is used to frequenting (he’s certainly not the clientele that they’re used to serving if the looks the woman behind the impeccably clean counter keeps giving him are anything to go by) but he’s got the place to himself and he has the cash to pay for his drinks so it’ll have to do.

He paces himself (a difficult task on even the most normal of nights) and, exactly an hour and twenty-five minutes later, he’s had only three glasses of the cheapest whiskey they had on the shelf (and is considering ordering a fourth just for the hell of it) when the door opens and Donnie comes walking in. He sits down on the stool to the right of Cassidy and folds his hands on the counter, staring straight ahead for a moment before finally turning to face the man he had shown up to talk to.

“He found him. He’s about half an hour from here in an abandoned warehouse.” He’s got a slip of paper suddenly tucked between his fingers and he’s placing it gently down, sliding it over to Cassidy.

“Who took ‘im?” Cassidy asks as he stands, adjusts his jacket and Donnie is mirroring his movements but neither of them have made a move to actually leave the bar yet.

“Some guys who used to work for Quincannon about ten months ago. Said it had something to do with you.”

“ _Me_?” Cassidy couldn’t say that he was expecting to hear that. If someone had an issue with him and they really wanted to make a scene out of it, he figured they’d come right for him directly, not go after one of his only real friends. “What did I do to _them_?”

“Don’t know,” Donnie says. “I’m just telling you what he told me.”

“Well, tell your boss thanks for this,” Cassidy says, waves the slip of paper and starts for the door, “And I won’t forget about the whole favor thing. I promise not to kill myself again just to get out of it.” He’s got his hand on the doorknob when an arm reaches out to intercept him and Cassidy spins on his heels, stares at the limb blocking his path and then glares up at Donnie. “What’re you doing?”

“I’m going with you.”

“No thanks,” Cassidy says, ducks under Donnie’s outstretched arm and steps out onto the sidewalk but Donnie is still there, still right behind him and Cassidy pauses again, tries to look even a little bit menacing but Donnie doesn’t seem the least bit impressed.

“He told me to go with you, so I’m going with you.” A pause to let out a slow exhale. “I’m not happy about it either but I do what he says.”

“Don’t you get tired of doing what he says?” Cassidy asks and Donnie opens his mouth as if he’s going to honestly answer him but he glances at Quincannon’s building like he thinks it can hear him and changes his mind, pulls out a large set of keys instead.

“We’ll take my truck,” he says, starts walking without waiting for Cassidy to catch up which he eventually does and he matches Donnie’s stride, hands low in his pockets and a frown stretched across his face.

 

— — —

 

“He was on his way to meet me when he got grabbed,” Cassidy says to Donnie once they’ve been on the road for about fifteen minutes and he sticks his fingers out the crack in his window, feels the cold air rushing through them. It was unusual for him to be outside at this time; the sun hadn’t officially come up yet but it would be getting there fast and Cassidy liked to be safe inside his (or, sometimes, Jesse’s) apartment before that happened. The last thing he wanted was to think he had just a few more minutes to spare and then find himself trapped somewhere he absolutely didn’t want to spend all of those hours of daylight (he wasn’t going to risk putting himself through a repeat of the hunter’s bar any time soon) but he wasn’t planning on leaving Jesse in the lurch and he definitely didn’t trust Donnie to do the right thing if left alone with a possibly vulnerable Jesse (although, Jesse had remarked once that Donnie had seemed to have calmed down quite a bit from the days of overtly wanting to kill him so maybe things had been somewhat forgiven or Quincannon had finally talked some semblance of sense into him. Jesse was obviously of great interest to Quincannon (or, as he had said earlier that morning, it was just that he had something Quincannon wanted) and Jesse would be of no use to anyone dead.)

Where Jesse may or may not have been going and why wasn’t really something that was any of Donnie’s business and it wasn’t as if he had a particularly inviting or comforting atmosphere about him but talking about this was a way of filling the silence (Cassidy hated the quiet, always had; he’d rather ramble and make a fool out of himself then have to deal with nothing at all and a tinny ringing in his ears). It was a way, too, he figures, of keeping his brain busy so he couldn’t think about how whatever was being done to Jesse right at that very moment was entirely his own fault and it was for something he couldn’t even sort through the mess in his brain to pinpoint exactly which somehow made it worse. (He’d angered so many people over his lifetime that it could literally be anyone—they could fill a stadium, and, depending on the day, Cassidy either regretted that or saw it as one of his greatest accomplishments; today was the former). “I was going to tell him somethin’.” He looks over at Donnie who’s trying really hard to pretend that he doesn’t want to be involved in this discussion, doesn’t want to move it forward, but his curiosity wins out in the end.

“What were you gonna tell him?”

“I was going to tell him what I was,” Cassidy says, returns his attention back to his window and Donnie grunts, says nothing in return for a few seconds either because he doesn’t care or because he was considering things.

“I think he already knows what you are,” Donnie says at last. _A criminal_ , was the implication with those words. _A drug addict. A pain in the ass._ Cassidy laughs derisively, opens his window a bit more to be able to fit his whole hand through the space he created.

“He doesn’t know everything.” He reaches for his pocket to take out a cigarette before remembering that he’d given them all away so he sits forward in his seat, starts searching around and finally settles on the glove box but the only thing inside is an impressively sized handgun, which he takes out to look over. He whistles appreciatively, weighs it, points it towards the windshield, closes one eye but there’s a hand on his arms suddenly, pushing them back under the dashboard and out of sight.

“Jesus!” Donnie cries. “People can see that.”

“Thought these windows were tinted,” Cassidy says, wraps his knuckles on the glass.

“Just the ones in the back,” Donnie tells him.

“This one for me?” Cassidy asks as innocently as he can manage even though he knows he’ll take it no matter the answer and Donnie glances at him, at the gun, exhales slowly, tightens his grip on the steering wheel.

“Guess so,” he says, although he doesn’t seem the least bit pleased with the idea of Cassidy having any sort of weapon.

“Where’s yours, then?”

“Under the backseat,” Donnie tells him with the tone of someone who was really wishing that the person he was talking to would shut the hell up without him having to actually say those specific words. Cassidy figures he could do him a favor just this once and he ends their conversation, goes back to staring out his window and keeps a close eye on the gradually brightening sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can find me [@kenlubin](http://kenlubin.tumblr.com/) on tumblr.


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